Chapter 32

The Home Office wanted confirmation of what I had already told them and proved in documents I had sent them. ‘Are you British? How did you acquire this nationality? Were you born or adopted in the UK or were you registered or naturalised as a British Citizen in the UK or were you born abroad and acquired your nationality by descent by virtue of your father’s British Citizenship?’

I took this to be ‘How British are you? Are you quite British, British or very British?’ I hoped that my birth certificate would tell that I was as British as could be, so I copied it and sent it off. They also wanted to know that my name was entered on the children’s birth certificates as their father. Odd as the Home Office had the birth certificates in their possession.

The other burning question was about Tina’s marital status at the time of birth. Had she been married or separated, I would have had to state the nationality of her husband. As she had been ‘bifurcated’, I was able to state this. They required evidence. I wrote to her for a copy of her divorce papers.

The letter finished with ‘given the area with which we are dealing it may take some time before our enquiries can be completed.’

It still seemed quite simple to me. They are my children; Tina is not related to them; here they are, here they stay.

Yet the law, I knew, was far more complex. What was unimaginable a few decades ago and certainly at the time many of the laws were formulated, had become a fact around which it had to bend its head.

The QC I had consulted had pointed out the anomalies in my situation. He stated in his opinion it ‘would seem to constitute clear discrimination on the grounds of sex’. But when the 1981 British Nationality Act was passed, it was justified on the basis that ‘it was difficult to prove paternity’ at the time.

Developments in modern technology and in particular DNA fingerprinting had since made it a great deal easier to prove such paternity. But until Parliament updated the law, the only challenge to it was via the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights on the ‘right to respect for private and family life’ and the ‘prohibition of discrimination’.

This challenge of course was against a ruling that the boys wouldn’t receive permanent leave to remain in the country, that is to say they would be extradited. The QC opined that a challenge would only be successful in my case subject to there being ‘a female relative resident in the household willing to look after the child and capable of doing so.’ With my aunt in her nineties living a hundred miles away, this wasn’t going to be a winning proposition.

Curiously, for the gay couple, the decision had been made within a couple of months. They had just breezed in. Their surrogate was, I gathered, married. Their children were happily settled in this country.

Though undoubtedly my sons’ father, I seemed to be fair game—as I was to discover on the ‘Esther’ programme.

‘It’s about whether dads can be mums,’ the driver told me on the way to the White City for the recording.

Sitting next to me on the podium was a British surrogate, pregnant and well-versed in media-handling. Next to her were two men casually dressed. One had been dropped into lone fatherhood by bereavement; the other by divorce. They had coped brilliantly with the task that had been thrust upon them.

Not for them were there any probing questions inviting them to justify their existence. Some decades back it might have been different. One could only sympathise and admire.

Having just watched the previous, rather upbeat programme being recorded, I thought I would try a casual approach. One of the audience, an agony aunt, launched the attack. ‘When one has a disabled child, one compensates. You have created disabled children. They will have no idea of the interplay between men and women.’

She had decided that I would never meet anyone. A pity. I had hoped that I might. Another followed up with ‘You cannot always have what you want. You have manipulated events.’ A buttoned-up matron at the front, skirt clutched tight around her lest some contagion might seep osmotically from me to her, considered I was unworthy to be on the same podium as the other men and was in it for ‘self-aggrandisement’ as I had admitted to being on the programme three or four times before. It seemed to make no difference that I had been on the programme over several years on completely unrelated issues. There was no stopping her.

Esther phoned me the following day. ‘I think I’m the only one who knows how sensitive you are. You cover it up so well. That woman in the front was very cruel. I think she’s ‘pro life’ or something. You could have said, "Do you know how hurtful what you have said is?"’

‘Actually, I thought at the time, what I wanted to say was that she would feel much better after a good rogering and that, had I not come on the show out of loyalty to you, I wouldn’t have had to give people like her the time of day. But I suspect you would have edited it out anyway.’

‘We have to cut some time, so I’ll see what we should edit out.’

There was my private life and my private persona and, by my very presence, there was I inviting these people I would never see again to have a poke around in both.

Another woman in the audience had seemed to have taken a leaf out the Jeremy Paxman charm handbook.

‘You don’t even know that you’ll be allowed to keep them, do you?’

I could think of better ways of spending a Wednesday afternoon.

‘I think these women saw you as a threat,’ Esther told me. ‘There you are proving you don’t need a woman in your life. You can just get on with things. What you have never made much of is what you do for your father.’

‘Of course not. I know how he would feel about how he is now. He would hate it and he would hate everyone to know.’

I knew that she was saying it stopped people knowing what I am really like, but I felt that the guard was what was holding me together.